Phil Reisman: New York has a long, proud history of corruption; let's not repeat it

May 11, 2013

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While reading the panoramic “New York Diaries,” I came across a terse but trenchant entry from one of the book’s featured diarists, George Templeton Strong.

Strong wrote in 1873: “Boss Tweed the meisterdieb (master thief) sentenced to 12 years and a moderate fine. Good as far as it goes.”

He was referring to William M. Tweed, the overstuffed kingpin of Tammany Hall whose criminal lust for money and power made him the personification of public corruption. Tweed’s larcenous ways established a standard of crookedness against which all subsequent politician-crooks in New York are measured.

Comparisons to Tweed have been endemic in the past seven years, a period that has produced so many crooked elected officials that, taken as a whole, they could convene a separate legislature for a small-sized state. Call it Rogue Island.

Tweedisms abound these days.

It’s gotten so bad that Gov. Andrew Cuomo famously commented, “Sometimes, the corruption in Albany could even make Boss Tweed blush.”

That may be true if the corruption is viewed as a whole. However, taken individually, today’s crooks seem like nickel-and-dime racketeers next to Boss Tweed, who was once the third-largest landowner in New York City and was said to have stolen as much as $200 million from taxpayers at a time when a million bucks was a serious amount of money. Now there was a meisterdieb for you.

Bruno, Sampson, Smith, Espada, Krueger, Leibell, Spano and the rest of the modern-day accused and/or convicted may be diebs — but none are meisterdiebs.

Still, the diarist Strong, a prolific observer of mid-19th century New York, reminds us how deep the roots of corruption really are. It’s easy to relate to his weary disgust. The punchline, “Good as far as it goes,” sums up a feeling felt in Strong’s time as well as ours that perhaps the penalties are not nearly as severe as they should be for those who violate the public trust.

Newly elected state legislators, I’ve noticed lately, are taking great pains to explain away the corruption as a kind of anomaly, an epidemic that is confined to the old-timers, or a “few bad apples.” All that’s required, they say, is a purge or a “cleansing.”

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Age and tenure probably do play a role in ripening a propensity for theft, but it’s also true that some of the bad apples are green. Witness the case of Eric Stevenson, the Democratic assemblyman from the Bronx who was charged last month with taking more than $22,000 in bribes from developers in his district. He was elected in 2010.

It’s interesting how every new generation, or class, believes it’s purer than the one that came before it.

But greed and fear transcend generations — and I think those two primitive emotions govern the collective reptilian brain of Albany.

Fear can be used to deter greed — and I can’t think of anything more frightening to a corrupt politician, a would-be dieb, than the prospect of losing his or her pension.

Several legislators on both sides of the aisle have proposed amending the state Constitution to make it possible to strip the retirement benefits of any state or local public official convicted of a felony.

The latest amendment proposal came last week from Assemblyman David Buchwald, D-White Plains, who accurately summed up the public mood when he said in a news release: “People are tired of corrupt officials taking advantage of the system. This legislation takes a step toward putting integrity and trust back into our state government.”

Buchwald’s call for change happened a day before Shirley L. Huntley, the former state senator from Queens, was sentenced to a year in prison for stealing from a nonprofit organization she ran. (Another good idea: Keep legislators away from nonprofits that operate with taxpayers’ money.)

Huntley cooperated with the feds by wearing a wire during conversations with other state senators.

Changing the constitution is a long process. It takes a vote in both houses of the Legislature, then it must be approved again by both houses two years later by a newly elected body. Only then will it be put before voters in a referendum.

The wait would be worth it.

Putting a crooked pol in a minimum-security pen for a short stretch knocked down to a month or two in a halfway house is “good as far as it goes,” as George Templeton Strong said.